With Lawrence in Arabia

By Lowell Thomas

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With Lawrence in Arabia is an account of T.E. Lawrence's exploits during World War I.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles River Editors
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781508089551

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THOMAS

FOREWORD

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SURELY NO ONE EVER OFFERED a volume to the public who was quite so deeply indebted to others, and I have long looked forward to the opportunity of expressing my gratitude. To do this I must turn back the pages of time to the days when, accompanied by my photographic colleague, Mr. Harry A. Chase, and two other assistants, I left America to gather information and secure a pictorial record of the various phases of the struggle that was then in progress all the way from the North Sea to far off Arabia.

We had set forth early in 1917 and were expected to return at the end of a year or so to help in the work of stimulating enthusiasm for the Allied Cause. The late Mr. Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of Interior, had suggested that I resign from the faculty of Princeton University in order to undertake this. To Secretary Lane, Secretary of the Navy Daniels, and Secretary for War Baker, who were responsible for our becoming attached successively to the various Allied armies, I am indebted for the opportunities which enabled me to obtain the material for this volume. This was before a special appropriation had been set aside for such work, and as the result of Secretary Lane’s suggestion, eighteen distinguished private citizens supplied the funds for the undertaking.

Mr. Chase and I have just concluded a three-year speaking tour of the world, during which I have shown the pictorial record and narrated to several million people the story which we brought back of Allenby’s conquest of the Holy Land, and the hitherto unknown story of Lawrence and the War in the land of the Arabian Nights. The generous praise and innumerable courtesies which have been extended to us during this tour have been received by us on behalf of these eighteen nameless gentlemen. For it is to them that the credit is due. In Europe, Americans are commonly regarded as mere worshippers of Mammon; yet these financiers are typical American business men, and if this book proves to be a contribution of value because it happens to be the only written fragmentary record of the most romantic campaign in history, then the credit belongs to these unselfish, anonymous gentlemen of Chicago. For had it not been for them, the story of Colonel Lawrence’s achievements in Arabia might never have been told, and might never have become very widely known even among his own countrymen.

To Colonel John Buchan, who in those days was one of the mysterious high priests of the Ministry of Information, I am indebted for the permit that got me out to Palestine at the time when other missions were not allowed there, and at the time when Allenby, Britain’s modern Coeur de Lion, was leading his army in the most brilliant cavalry campaign of all time. I also am deeply indebted to the great Commander-in-Chief himself, and likewise to the chief of his Intelligence Staff, Brigadier-General Sir Gilbert F. Clayton. It was they who were responsible for our being the only observers attached to the Shereefian forces in Holy Arabia.

During the time that Mr. Chase and I were in Arabia, I found it impossible to extract much information from Lawrence himself regarding his own achievements. He insisted on giving the entire credit to Emir Feisal and other Arab leaders, and to his fellow adventurers, Colonel Wilson, of the Sudan, Newcombe, Joyce, Dawnay, Bassett, Vickery, Cornwallis, Hogarth, Stirling, etc., all of whom did magnificent work in Arabia. So to them I went for much of my material, and I am indebted to various members of this group of brilliant men whom General Clayton used in his Near Eastern Secret Corps. Eager to tell me of the achievements of their quiet scholarly companion, they refused to say much about themselves, although their own deeds rivalled those of the heroes of The Arabian Nights.

To the Right Honourable Lord Riddell, and to Mr. Louis D. Froelick, editor of Asia Magazine, I am grateful for the encouragement which led me to believe that I should attempt the delightful task of recording what little I know of this romance of real life. I owe a special debt to Miss Elsie Weil, former managing editor of Asia Magazine; also to Captain Alan Bott, M.C., R.A.F. (Contact); to my colleague, Mr. Dale Carnagey, the American novelist; and to my wife—for it was their invaluable co-operation that finally enabled me to prepare this volume.

There are others infinitely better qualified than I to give the world a full account of the Arabian Revolution. For instance, Commander D. G. Hogarth, the famous Arabian authority who played a prominent advisory part, could easily do this. It is to be hoped that his archaeological work and duties as curator of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford will not prevent him from preparing a final official history. But it is to Lawrence himself that we must look for the inside story of the War in the land of the Arabian Nights.

Unhappily, no matter how much unselfish work a man does for his country, and no matter how modest he is, there are always people hovering about on the side lines ready to tear his record to pieces. For instance, there are those who say that Lawrence has received altogether too much publicity through me. They piously declare that this is not in accordance with military ethics. There may be something in this, though I doubt it. But if there is, the blame should all be mine.

There is no question but what the praise I have given him has embarrassed him exceedingly. Indeed, had he realised when I was in Arabia that I one day would be going up and down the world shouting his praises, I have not the slightest doubt but what he would have planted one of his nitro-glycerine tulips under me instead of under a Turkish train!

However, not only did Lawrence little dream that I might one day be booming him, as he describes it, but it had never even occurred to me that I should be so doing. The conspirators who were largely responsible for my coming to England were Sir William Jury, formerly of the Ministry of Information, and Major Evelyn Wrench, of the English Speaking Union, and more particularly, Mr. Percy Burton, the London impresario formerly associated with Sir Henry Irving, and Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson. It was Mr. Burton who came to me in New York and inveigled me into agreeing to appear for a season at Covent Garden Royal Opera House, London, with my production, With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia.

Another bazaar rumour that has been going the rounds is to the effect that Colonel Lawrence has renounced Christianity and turned Mohammedan. This also is the offspring of some feverish imagination! From what I saw of Lawrence I rather believe that he is a better Christian than the most of us. In his introduction to a new edition of Doughty’s classic, Arabia Deserta, he says of that great Arabian traveller: He was book-learned, but simple in the arts of living, trustful of every man, very silent. He was the first Englishman they had met. He predisposed them to give a chance to other men of his race, because they found him honourable and good. So he broke a road for his religion. They say that he seemed proud only of being Christian, and yet never crossed their faith. The tribute he pays to Doughty might be applied equally appropriately to himself.

L. T.

The introduction by T. E. Lawrence to Travels in Arabia Deserta, by Charles Montague Doughty, which the author quotes on page 311, is contained in the edition published in 1921 by Messrs. Jonathan Cape.

WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA

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CHAPTER I.

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A MODERN ARABIAN KNIGHT

ONE DAY NOT LONG AFTER Allenby had captured Jerusalem, I happened to be in front of a bazaar stall on Christian Street, remonstrating with a fat old Turkish shopkeeper who was attempting to relieve me of twenty piastres for a handful of dates. My attention was suddenly drawn to a group of Arabs walking in the direction of the Damascus Gate. The fact that they were Arabs was not what caused me to drop my tirade against the high cost of dates, for Palestine, as all men know, is inhabited by a far greater number of Arabs than Jews. My curiosity was excited by a single Bedouin, who stood out in sharp relief from all his companions. He was wearing an agal, kufheh, and abba such as are worn only by Near Eastern potentates. In his belt was fastened the short curved sword of a prince of Mecca, insignia worn by descendants of the Prophet.

Christian Street is one of the most picturesque and kaleidoscopic thoroughfares in the Near East. Russian Jews, with their corkscrew curls, Greek priests in tall black hats and flowing robes, fierce desert nomads in goatskin coats reminiscent of the days of Abraham, Turks in balloon-like trousers, Arab merchants lending a brilliant note with their gay turbans and gowns, all rub elbows in that narrow lane of bazaars, shops, and coffeehouses that leads to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Jerusalem is not a melting-pot. It is an uncompromising meeting-place of East and West. Here are accentuated, as if sharply outlined in black and white by the desert sun, the racial peculiarities of Christian, Jewish, and Mohammedan peoples. A stranger must, indeed, have something extraordinary about him to attract attention in the streets of the Holy City. But as this young Bedouin passed by in his magnificent royal robes, the crowds in front of the bazaars turned to look at him.

It was not merely his costume, nor yet the dignity with which he carried his five feet three, marking him every inch a king or perhaps a caliph in disguise who had stepped out of the pages of The Arabian Nights. The striking fact was that this mysterious prince of Mecca looked no more like a son of Ishmael than an Abyssinian looks like one of Stefansson’s red-haired Esquimaux; Bedouin, although of the Caucasian race, have had their skins scorched by the relentless desert sun until their complexions are the colour of lava. But this young man was as blond as a Scandinavian, in whose veins flow viking blood and the cool traditions of fjords and sagas.

The nomadic sons of Ishmael all wear flowing beards, as their ancestors did in the time of Esau. This youth, with the curved gold sword, was clean shaven. He walked rapidly with his hands folded, his blue eyes oblivious to his surroundings, and he seemed wrapped in some inner contemplation.

My first thought as I glanced at his face was that he might be one of the younger apostles returned to life. His expression was serene, almost saintly, in its selflessness and repose.

Who is he? I turned eagerly to the Turk profiteer, who could only manipulate a little tourist English. He merely shrugged his shoulders

Who could he be? I was certain I could obtain some information about him from General Storrs, Governor of the Holy City, and so I strolled over in the direction of; his palace beyond the old wall, near Solomon’s Quarries. General Ronald Storrs, British successor to Pontius Pilate, had been Oriental secretary to the High Commissioner of Egypt before the fall of Jerusalem, and for years had kept in intimate touch with the peoples of Palestine. He spoke Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Arabic with the same fluency with which he spoke English. I knew he could tell me something about the mysterious blond Bedouin.

Who is this blue-eyed, fair-haired fellow wandering about the bazaars wearing the curved sword of a prince of ——?

The general did not even let me finish the question but quietly opened the door of an adjoining room. There, seated at the same table where von Falkenhayn had worked out his unsuccessful plan for defeating Allenby, was the Bedouin prince, deeply absorbed in a ponderous tome on archaeology.

In introducing us the governor said, I want you to meet Colonel Lawrence, the Uncrowned King of Arabia.

He shook hands shyly and with a certain air of aloofness, as if his mind were on buried treasure and not on the affairs of this immediate world of campaigns and warfare. And that was how I first made the acquaintance of one of the most picturesque personalities of modern times, a man who will be blazoned on the romantic pages of history with Raleigh, Drake, Clive and Gordon.

During the period of the World War, years crammed with epic events, among others, two remarkable figures appeared. The dashing adventures and anecdotes of their careers will furnish golden themes to the writers of the future, as the lives of Ulysses, King Arthur, and Richard the Lion-Hearted did to the poets, troubadours, and chroniclers of other days. One is a massive, towering, square-jawed six-footer, that smashing British cavalry leader, Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby, commander of the twentieth-century Crusaders, who gained world fame because of his exploits in driving the Turks from the Holy Land and bringing to realization the dream of centuries. The other is the under-sized, beardless youth whom I first saw absorbed in a technical treatise on the cuneiform inscriptions discovered on the bricks of ancient Babylon, and whose chief interests in life were poetry and archaeology.

The spectacular achievements of Thomas Edward Lawrence, the young Oxford graduate, were unknown to the public at the end of the World War. Yet, quietly, without any theatrical head-lines or fanfare of trumpets, he brought the disunited nomadic tribes of Holy and Forbidden Arabia into a unified campaign against their Turkish oppressors, a difficult and splendid stroke of policy, which caliphs, statesmen, and sultans had been unable to accomplish in centuries of effort! Lawrence placed himself at the head of the Bedouin army of the Shereef of Mecca, who was afterward proclaimed King of the Hedjaz. He united the wandering tribes of the desert, restored the sacred places of Islam to the descendants of the Prophet, and drove the Turks from Arabia forever. Allenby liberated Palestine, the Holy Land of the Jews and Christians. Lawrence freed Arabia, the Holy Land of millions of Mohammedans.

I had heard of this mystery man many times during the months I was in Palestine with Allenby. The first rumour about Lawrence reached me when I was on the way from Italy to Egypt. An Australian naval officer confided to me that an Englishman was supposed to be in command of an army of wild Bedouins somewhere in the trackless desert of the far-off land of Omar and Abu-Bekr. When I landed in Egypt I heard fantastic tales of his exploits. His name was always mentioned in hushed tones, because at that time the full facts regarding the War in the Land of the Arabian Nights were being kept secret.

Until the day I met him in the palace of the Governor of Jerusalem I was unable to picture him as a real person. He was to me merely a new Oriental legend. Cairo Jerusalem, Damascus, Bagdad—in fact, all the cities of the Near East—are so full of colour and romance that the mere mention of them is sufficient to stimulate the imagination of matter-of-fact Westerners, who are suddenly spirited away on the magic carpet of memory to childhood scenes familiar through the tales of The Thousand and One Nights. So I had come to the conclusion that Lawrence was the product of Western imagination overheated by exuberant contact with the East. But the myth turned out to be very much of a reality.

The five-foot-three Englishman standing before me wore a kuffieh of white silk and gold embroidery held in place over his hair by an agal, two black woollen cords wrapped with silver and gold thread. His heavy black camel’s-hair robe or abba covered a snow-white undergarment fastened at the waist by a wide gold-brocaded belt in which he carried the curved sword of a prince of Mecca. This youth had virtually become the ruler of the Holy Land of the Mohammedans, and commander-in-chief of many thousands of Bedouins mounted on racing camels and fleet Arabian horses. He was the terror of the Turks.

Through his discovery that archaeology held a fascination for me, we became better acquainted during the following days in Jerusalem before he returned to his Arabian army. We spent many hours together, although I did not suspect that it might possibly be my good fortune to join him later in the desert. When we were in the company of officers whom he had just met he usually sat in one corner, listening intently to everything that was being said but contributing little to the conversation. When we were alone he would get up from his chair and squat on the floor in Bedouin fashion. The first time he did this he blushed in his peculiar way and excused himself, saying that he had been in the desert so long that he found it uncomfortable sitting in a chair,

I made many unsuccessful attempts to induce him to tell me something of his life and adventures in the desert, where few Europeans except Sir Richard Burton and Charles Doughty ever dared venture before him. But he always adroitly changed the subject to archaeology, comparative religion, Greek literature, or Near Eastern politics. Even concerning his connection with the Arabian army he would say nothing, except to give the credit for everything that happened in the desert campaign to the Arab leaders, or to Newcombe, Joyce, Cornwallis, Dawnay, Marshall, Stirling, Hornby, and his other British associates.

Surely Destiny never played a stranger prank than when it selected, as the man to play the major role in the liberation of Arabia, this Oxford graduate, whose life-ambition was to dig in the ruins of antiquity and to uncover and study long-forgotten cities.

CHAPTER II

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IN SEARCH OF A LOST CIVILIZATION

WHEN WE FIRST MET IN Jerusalem, and later on in the solitude of the desert, I was unable to draw Lawrence out about his early life. So, after the termination of the War, on my way back to America, I visited England in the hope of being able to learn something concerning his career prior to 1914, which might throw a light on the formative period when Destiny was preparing him for his important role. The War had so scattered his family and early associates that I found it difficult to obtain aught but the most meagre information about his boyhood.

County Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, was the original home of the Lawrences. This may partly account for his unusual powers of physical endurance, for the inhabitants of Galway are among the hardiest of a hardy race. But in his veins there also flows Scotch, Welsh, English, and Spanish blood. Among his celebrated ancestors was Sir Robert Lawrence, who accompanied Richard the Lion-Hearted to the Holy Land, seven hundred and thirty years ago and distinguished himself at the siege of Acre, just as the youthful T. E. Lawrence accompanied Allenby to the Holy Land and distinguished himself in its final deliverance. The brothers, Sir Henry and Sir John Lawrence of Mutiny fame, pioneers of Britain’s empire in India, were amongst his more recent predecessors.

His father, Thomas Lawrence, was at one time the owner of estates in Ireland and a great sportsman. Losing most of his worldly possessions during the Gladstone period, when the bottom fell out of land values in Ireland, he brought his family across the Irish Sea to Wales, and Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in Carnarvon County, not far from the early home of Mr. Lloyd George, who is to-day one of his warmest friends and admirers, and who once told me that he, too, regards Lawrence as one of the most picturesque figures of modern times.

Five years of his boyhood were spent on the Channel Isle of Jersey. When he was ten years of age his family migrated to the north of Scotland, remaining there for three years. They next moved to France, where young Lawrence attended a Jesuit College, although all the members of the family belong to the orthodox Church of England. From the Continent they went to Oxford, and that centre of English culture, which has been their home ever since, has left its indelible mark on Lawrence. There Ned, as his boyhood companions called him, attended Oxford High School and studied under a tutor preparatory to entering the University. One of his school chums relates that although not a star athlete he had a daring spirit and was filled with the love of adventure.

Underneath Oxford, this companion tells us, "runs a subterranean stream bricked over, the Trill Mill Stream. Ned Lawrence and another boy, carrying lights and often lying flat to scrape through the narrow culverts, navigated the whole of that underground water passage.

Oxford is a great boating centre. Every stream that joins the Thames is explored as far up as any slender craft will float. But the River Cherwell above Islip is said by the guide-books to be ‘nowhere navigable.’ To say that is to challenge boys like Ned Lawrence to prove the statement untrue, and that is what he and a companion did. They trained their canoe to Banbury and came right down the part of the stream that was ‘nowhere navigable.’

He was fond of climbing trees and scrambling over the roofs of buildings where none dared follow. It was on such an occasion, one of his brothers informed me, that he fell and broke a leg. His relatives attribute his smallness of stature to that accident. He seems never to have grown since.

All his life he has been as irregular in his ways as the wild tribesmen of the Arabian Desert. Although he completed the required four years’ work for his Bachelor’s degree in three years, he never attended a single lecture at Oxford, so far as I have been able to discover. He occasionally worked with tutors, but he spent most of his time wandering about England on foot, or reading mediaeval literature. In order to be alone he frequently slept by day and then read all night.

He was entirely opposed to any set system of education. The aged professor who angrily admonished Samuel Johnson when a student at Oxford, Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge, would have been equally displeased with young Lawrence. The idea of obtaining a University education in order to take up a conventional occupation did not please him at all. His unconscious credo from earliest youth, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s, seems to have been that pleasures are more beneficial than duties, because, like the quality of mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice blest.

As a part of his early reading he made an exhaustive study of military writers, from the wars of Sennacherib, Thotmes and Rameses down to Napoleon, Wellington, Stonewall Jackson, and von Moltke. But this he did voluntarily and not as a part of any required work. Among his favourite books was Marshal Foch’s Principe de Guerre; but he remarked to me on one occasion in Arabia, that his study of Caesar and Xenophon had been of more value to him in his desert campaign, because in the irregular war which he conducted against the Turks he found it necessary to adopt tactics directly opposed to those advocated by the great French strategist.

As the subject for his Oxford thesis Lawrence chose the military architecture of the Crusades, and so absorbed did he become in this work that he urged his parents to allow him to visit the Near East, so that he might gain first-hand knowledge of the architectural efforts of the early knights of Christendom. In this he was encouraged by the distinguished Oxford scholar and authority on Arabia, Dr. David George Hogarth, curator of the Ashmolean Museum, a man who has had an important influence over his entire life down to the present day, and who even came out to Egypt during the War and acted as his intimate counsellor during the Arabian campaign.

Lawrence’s mother was reluctant to have him leave home but, after many weeks of pleading, gave her consent to his visiting Syria as a Cook’s tourist and allowed him two hundred pounds for the trip. His family was certain that he would return home after a few weeks, satisfied to settle down for the rest of his days and ready to forget the heat, the smells, and the inconveniences of life in the Orient.

But on reaching the Near East he scorned tourists’ comforts and the beaten track. He entered Syria at Beyrouth and, shortly after landing, adopted native costume and set out barefoot for the interior. Instead of travelling as a tourist, he wandered off alone, along the fringe of the Great Arabian Desert, and amused himself studying the manners and customs of the mosaic of peoples who dwell in the ancient corridor between Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley. Two years later, when he finally returned to Oxford to hand in his thesis and receive his degree, he still had one hundred pounds left!

There were five boys in the Lawrence family, of which Thomas Edward was the second youngest. The eldest, Major Montague Lawrence, was a major in the R.A.M.C.; the second, William, a schoolmaster at Delhi, in India; the third, Frank, who finished at Oxford and wandered off to the Near East with Thomas, and the youngest, Arnold, a star track athlete at Oxford, who is also interested in archaeology, and for a time took his brother’s place in Mesopotamia. Both William and Frank gave their lives to their country on the battle-fields of France.

Since the War Major Montague Lawrence has taken up work as a medical missionary in China far up on the Tibetan frontier; their mother has also gone to this remote corner of Central Asia, while her youngest son is roaming around the museums of the world on a travelling fellowship from Oxford, studying the sculpture of the period of the decadence of Grecian art.

Several years before the War an expedition from Oxford, headed by Lawrence’s friend Hogarth, the great antiquarian and archaeologist, began excavating in the Euphrates Valley, hoping to uncover traces of that little-known ancient race, the Hittites. Because of his intimate knowledge of their language and his sympathetic understanding of their customs, Lawrence was placed in charge of the digging gangs of unruly Kurds, Turkomans, Armenians, and Arabs. This expedition eventually succeeded in uncovering Carchemish, the ancient capital of the Hittite Empire, and there, amid the ruins of that long-forgotten city, Lawrence amused himself studying inscriptions on pottery and joining up the various stages of Hittite civilization.

He and his associate, C. Leonard Woolley, director of the expedition, actually uncovered ruins which proved to be the missing link between the civilizations of Nineveh and Babylon and the beginnings of Greek culture in the islands of the Mediterranean, which extend back for five thousand years. The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford contains many exhibits presented by T. E. Lawrence before he was twenty years of age.

An American traveller and director of missions in the Near East happened to visit the camp of these lonely excavators. He gives us a vivid picture of his visit and an indication of how Lawrence received the training which enabled him to gain such an amazing hold over the desert tribes when the Great War overtook him.

It was in 1913, says Mr. Luther R. Fowle, "Easter vacation at the American College in Aintab had given us the opportunity to make the three days’ trip by wagon to Ourfa, the ancient Edessa. After Ourfa, we had visited Haraun, a few miles to the south, whither Abraham migrated from Ur of the Chaldees.

"Our return trip to Aintab was by the road farther to the south, which brought us to the Euphrates River at Jerablus, over which the Germans were building their great railway bridge, an essential link in the Berlin-to-Bagdad dream. On the western bank, a few hundred yards from the bridge, was the site of Carchemish, and there we found the quiet British scholar, who, under the stress of the War, was soon to turn from his digging among the ancient ruins beside the Euphrates to become a shereef of Mecca and leader of a vast Bedouin host in a successful war to throw off the Ottoman yoke.

"Mr. Woolley, the archaeologist in charge of the work of excavation of Carchemish, had just come from the diggings, clad in his business dress of grey flannel shirt and golf trousers. Lawrence, his youthful associate, also fresh from the works, was stepping lightly across the mounds of earth clad in what we Americans would call a running suit, and wearing at his belt the ornate Arab girdle with its bunch of tassels at the front, the mark of an unmarried man. But he was out of sight in a moment, and when we gathered for supper the freshly-tubbed young man in his Oxford tennis-suit of white flannel bordered with red ribbon, but still wearing his Arab